A lot of things happened on "Straw," tonight's Season 6 opener of "Sons of Anarchy": Toric pushed Clay and Tara to rat out SAMCRO; There was a brutal clash over "torture porn"; Jax hooked up with a hooker; Tig drowned a thug in a tub of urine; Juice got his butt kicked; and they played a really sad Leonard Cohen song.

But the one plot twist that will certainly draw the most attention is the school shooting that went down in the final moments of the episode, recalling horrific memories of Sandy Hook, Columbine and other such tragic nightmares.

On the screen, we see a nameless young blond boy who we've followed at various times through the episode roll up his sleeves (he's a cutter), pull a gun out of his backpack and walk into his Stockton-based school where all hell breaks loose.

The sequence mercifully spared us the sight of any bloody carnage -- a rarity for this show -- as the camera kept its distance. But it was nevertheless traumatic and I experienced a few extra provincial-bred shudders. Oh, Kurt Sutter, why, oh why, did you have to set the shooting in Stockton? Hasn't that beleaguered Central California city been through enough?

Full disclosure: I grew up in Stockton and attended a Catholic school like the one depicted in the show. I also have sad memories of a real-life grade-school shooting that took place in Stockton long before Columbine -- in 1989 -- that killed five students and wounded 29 at Cleveland Elementary. So this sequence naturally hit home.

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But I digress. It will be interesting to see what kind of reaction the jarring plot twist provokes in chat rooms and on blogs -- whether fans felt it went over the line or not. In some ways, it felt like it ceased being a "SOA" episode.

Sutter, of course, knew it would be a point of contention. At this summer's TV critics's press tour he addressed why he chose to go there:

"I've wanted to do that story for about three years," he said. "Obviously, I knew that it would be somewhat controversial, but I feel like, as much as I wouldn't do something because it was controversial, I'm also not going to do something because it's controversial. I feel like it's an organic story to our world, in terms of it being what these guys do. I feel like, thematically, it's the right fit because we have a lead character that's a father who's trying to figure out if he can raise his sons and avoid the kind of violence that happens.

"So, that will continue to play out. There's a lot of blood and guts in my show. It is a signature of the show, but nothing is done gratuitously. The events that happen in the premiere are really the catalyst for the third act of this morality play that we're doing."

I've already seen the next two "SOA" episodes and the shooting does, indeed, continue to have an impact on the story line. It's interesting to see Jax's reaction to it, and exactly how it affects his decisions as SAMCRO leader.

But that's still to come. For now, what was your reaction to the gut wrenching plot twist? Did you think it went too far? Or did you approve of the way Sutter and director Paris Barclay handled it? And what did you think of the rest of the episode?